


Houston, We Have So Many Problems

by f0rt1ss1m0



Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: F/F, F/M, Might as well not be ANY plot for all I know, OC-centric, Probably just a screaming single dad and his adopted alien children doing crazy crap, Self-Indulgent, That's it that's all I know, Written completely off the fly
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-07-09
Updated: 2015-07-11
Packaged: 2018-04-08 13:33:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,541
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4307016
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/f0rt1ss1m0/pseuds/f0rt1ss1m0
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five alien kids are destroying my apartment. Or — four. They just did the glowy thing again and turned into a giant killing machine. Just...please. Help me. Please.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Goodnight Rocks

Normally it's not a great idea to pick up strange shoeboxes out of dorm Dumpsters, and college sophomore Max Albus can support that. 0 out of 10 does not recommend. There could be illegal drugs or bombs or magical alien children from outer space in the form of semiprecious stones or just meaningless college-kid junk that makes you feel like you wasted your time even _looking_ at it.

It was a November Friday midnight and he was cold.

His red bike — he got it when he was thirteen and had named it Joe — was on its last legs, or should he say, last wheels. The gears wouldn't change and his brakes shrieked. He was crunched in the seat with his puffy winter coat drawn up around his neck and lower face; his blue beanie pulled tightly over his springy brown hair and ears. If you got close to him you would smell fryer grease. You might also hear the tinny ringtone and vibration of an ancient phone in his back jeans pocket, but as he was riding over the bumpiest sidewalks on campus and his mind in the clouds, it went unnoticed.

Just as Max crossed the third-to-last intersection until home, a snow-laced gust of wind ripped through the air and forced him deeper into his coat, struggling to conserve what little body heat was left in him. His chapped lip caught on the zipper.

Then, just around a corner into an alley about thirty feet away, his squinting eyes caught a flash of light so bright it almost made him fall off his bike.

No one else was around to see it, except for some drunk guy across the street who yelled out his window "CASHEWS ARE A HEALTHY SNACK" before falling backwards out of sight. _He_ probably wouldn't be of any assistance. Being the brave inquisitive soul that he was, Max coasted and shrieked to a stop in front of said alley. The tenants of the dormitory buildings on either side hadn't seemed to notice anything unusual, so Max vaulted over the low gate.

It was just the normal twixt-dorm alley, really. A little cleaner because the trash was always collected on Mondays and today was Wednesday, but already bulbous black bags and miscellaneous Styrofoam things had begun to accumulate in and around the green containers. His sneaker accidentally kicked an empty soda can and it scattered, clattering against the asphalt and eventually rolling to a stop against a shoebox set in the absolute middle of the alley.

 _Well, this was a great waste of time,_ Max realized suddenly, shrugged his shoulders and turned around to ride home and go to sleep and do just the normal things that he'd prepared to do tonight.

Except that he didn't, because he realized another thing. Shoeboxes don't just put themselves in the direct center of anything and even if someone had put it there, it should have blown away in the wind if there wasn't something in it.

So he did the regrettable thing. He knelt and lifted the lid.

There was a lot of tissue paper, for one, but in the center at it all — five stones. Each about the size of a tennis ball. None of them diamonds or anything, just rocks that looked like they'd been plucked right from an overpriced overrated museum's gift shop. An opaque green one with light streaks through it; probably jade. A red one carved like a half circle sealed in a plastic bag with a triangular blue one; he couldn't really tell what they were. A circular yellow one faceted into a triangle — topaz? — and a rounded piece of reddish amber. All in pretty good condition besides being really cold.

Max shrugged and slipped the stones into his jacket pocket. They weighed heavily and clacked against each other dangerously, so he hastily moved the red, blue and green to the other pocket before scooping his phone up — it had started to ring frantically (again).

But he'd barely had time to lift it to his ear before his entire head was blasted back by a thundering voice.

**_"_ ** **_WHERE ARE YOU?!"_ **

The wind ripped through the alley just then, encouraging Max to turn back to his bike and get moving again. Gingerly he held the phone with his left hand and took the handlebars with his right, a bit wobbly to begin with but eventually getting up to speed. Yes, it did take him that long to craft a response.

"I had _work_ tonight, Chelle. I'm coming home now. What's going on?"

Rachel Jackson's voice was muffled and distant for a while, like she was yelling at other people. Probably was. Then she came back in the usual fire and thunder, causing Max to gently pull the phone away from his ear again. " _OOOOOOOOO-KAAAAAAY. So WHAT can we learn from this experience, I'll have to ask? That police NEVER do their jobs right. Obviously. I give 'em your number; is it SOOOO much to ask that a call at least GETS to you?"_

There was a sinking feeling in Max's chest just then, similar to the sinking you'd feel if you learned that the boat you're sitting in is actually sinking. "Did someone break into my place again?" he asked slowly, not really wanting to hear the answer.

The explosions of sarcastic _"Wow I thought you'd NEVER guess"s_ and " _It took you faster than the landlord to figure THAT out"_ s told him that yes, someone had indeed.

He wanted to slow down and be depressed by the side of the road, but he also wanted to start pedaling as hard as he could, maybe in a futile attempt to catch the perpetrator. Instead he just kept going at the same wishing-to-escape-the-wind-but-suffering-from-numbing-cold pace as before and asked the logical thing.

"What'd they steal?"

" _The entire contents of the refrigerator except the milk, which the investigator said meant they might be lactose intolerant. 'Cept that's BS because it's expired anyway."_

"What? Oh c'mon, I just bought that stuff two days ago — "

_"_ _They also took your junky TV and your phone charger, though what they're gonna do with that tip off a white crayon I got no idea."_

This was when Max really groaned, despite Chelle's creative term to describe his less-than-quality charger. "Who cares what _they're_ gonna do with it; what am I gonna do _without it?_ These phones haven't been sold for years; you think I can find a charger?"

 _"_ _Hmm."_ Someone in the background shouted something in a language that sounded like Arabic and Chelle yelled back in Chinese — linguistics majors were so weird. Then she was back in English. _"Just…I dunno. Get over there."_

He skidded to a stop just then in front of his apartment complex, a thin towering thing that seemed as if a regular building had been squished between the two on both sides of it. Sure enough a single cop car was parked outside, and the far left window of the third story was lit. "I am," Max told Chelle as he guided his bike through the front door and into the bleakly lit elevator that smelled like chalk dust. "Wait, are you even here?"

_"_ _Nah. I'm not done with my French paper, you know."_

"Oh."

_"_ _Sorry. I really had to split. Not even sure if I'll finish this tonight, even with Imelda helping. The cop's prolly still there though."_

The door was open when he came to it. "Yeah. I think she wants to talk to me. See you tomorrow, I guess."

_"_ _Yeah. See ya."_

* * *

The investigator didn't stay long, or even do much. Since nothing of real value was stolen and Max wasn't real keen on wasting time or money over a twelve-year-old TV that he never really used anyway, the tired cop checked over with him once more if anything else was stolen (nothing else was; his laptop was still hidden under the cracked tile in the kitchen and there wasn't much else in the tiny apartment _to_ steal) and reassured him that she would file a report with her superiors and keep an eye out for any eighteen-inch box TVs, containers of ramen and mac-n-cheese, or Cretaceous-era phone chargers. Then she left and Max stared at his desolate apartment before simply collapsing onto the foldout couch that he called a bed.

The stones in his pockets clacked together and idly, he pulled them out to look at. He was a chemistry major, not a geology major, but he did think he knew a guy. Raj, wasn't that his name. Yeah, he'd probably know if they were worth anything.

 _Hopefully, enough to get a new phone and a charger,_ Max murmured to himself ruefully, before setting his almost dead but chargerless phone on the table and slipping the rocks into the front pocket of his backpack.

Then, too tired to even change or shower, he rolled onto his stomach and closed his eyes. "Goodnight, rocks," he yawned just before falling asleep.

Naturally, he expected them not to respond.


	2. Jade

Max’s first class the next day was at nine in the morning — a general English comp course on the entire opposite site of campus from his apartment. After yesterday’s cold front it had started to _rain_ instead of snow and the weather that greeted him when he stepped outside that morning was a chilly pea soup fog, unstirrable even by what tiny wisps of wind were left over from last night’s tempest. Illinois weather was so weird.

There was nothing in his fridge except expired milk, which he poured down the sink drain. Max grumbled to himself as he picked up coffee and a couple hash browns from MacMillan’s, cursing whoever was desperate enough to steal a broke guy’s discount ramen and oatmeal.

He ducked inside class just as the professor walked through the door, and slipped into a seat of the back row. As he slipped his laptop out of his backpack the stones in his front pocket clacked together but being mostly sophomores and juniors in a morning class, nobody seemed to either notice nor care.

Until about fifteen minutes into the lecture, when they clacked again and began glowing.

Max didn’t really even notice at first but when it began tugging at the top of the backpack pocket, and when its force was enough to actually _lift his backpack off the ground,_ it definitely began attracting some stares. The girl to his right tapped his shoulder with her pen and whispered, “Uh, dude, something in your backpack’s tryin’ to go somewhere.”

_What?_ His heart skipped a beat when he looked down at the backpack and saw, very clearly, a single outline of one of the stones. And…it was _glowing?_ “Uh,” he stammered, and thinking fast he closed his laptop, grabbed his backpack and began to vacate the premises, “uh, I think…uh…take notes for me!”

And he was out.

“I don’t even know your name,” the girl said, staring after the slamming door. Then she shrugged, went back to her own notes and forgot about him, because this was college and not the Hunger Games. There is no room for trippy love triangles here.

Max was making his beeline to the bathrooms, trying not to drop his laptop or get carried into the air by a flying glowing rock. Was it a bomb? Some sort of magical amulet? Who knew. For one _he_ didn’t really care, because he was missing out on an English lecture and Professor Gallagher was _harsh_ when it came to testing stuff that was in lectures. If he bombed English, which he was already well on his way to doing, then the scholarship would be for nothing — they’d let him in for his English and chemistry grades; would they take it away because of them too?

It was just as he slammed and locked the bathroom door behind him that the backpack literally yanked itself out of his hands, skittering across the beige tile floor. He could clearly see the stone inside whizzing around the pocket, glowing brighter and moving faster and pulling tighter against the fabric until he thought it would surely break. In a split second he bounded forward, pinned the backpack to the floor and just managed to unzip the pocket before the round jade stone zinged up into the open and knocked him on the jaw. He flew backwards in an explosion of pain, stars and darkness.

When he was able to look up again, he definitely thought that he was knocked out. The gemstone hung in the air near the ceiling, surrounded in a bright, shifting silhouette that as he watched seemed to be adjusting to the shape of…a person. Amid the spears of brilliant green light there were two little hands lifted above her head; her figure was that of a chubby young girl’s. The glowing light began to clear and she touched to the ground.

She was almost completely green. That was the first thing Max noticed.

Her short hair, curled at the tips and falling in waves over one eye, was a thick mint green that matched her sari skirt and top. Her skin was darker, like pine needles. And the jade stone was _attached to her skin,_ just over where her bellybutton should have been; the same color as the one eye that he could see. It was a disinterested eye. Tired even though it seemed as if she had just woken up.

“I am going to leave now,” was all she said, in a small voice that sounded very much tired with life indeed — and of course he’d _know_ what tired with life sounded like — before walking right past him and reaching for the door.

That was the kicker. Max freaked. “No no no! You — you can’t go out there!” he blubbered, taking the gem-girl by the shoulder and spinning her around to face him. She looked no less exhausted by this, but didn’t touch the door lock again.

Now Max was stuck with explaining this ordeal without going into gory detail. “Um…” he stammered, and knelt to meet her eyes. “So, okay, I don’t know if you’re aware with this, but if you go out there it could be very bad. For me. Like…it’s not a good thing normally when a college dude walks out of a bathroom with a little girl like you and — trust me, even though I don’t want to hurt you, not everyone would believe that. So, uh…don’t, don’t touch anything for now. We’ll figure out what to do.”

“There is no ‘we’,” she replied shortly. “There is me and there is someone who does not know me, nor what to do. I can handle myself.”

She turned around again. Not good not good not good. Desperate, Max picked her up by the shoulders, carried her over to the other side of the bathroom near the window and set her down. “No no no, please don’t go out there, not now,” he tried awkwardly, looking around desperately for other solutions. His eyes landed on his backpack and the other four gemstones — currently inactive and with no strange alien girls to their names, but who knew — winked mischievously at him from their pocket. “Are, uh,” he scooped the backpack up and pointed at the gems. “Are they gonna turn into magical anime girls too?”

The girl looked at the other gems in the pocket and then reached in. She picked out the two in the plastic bag, then put them back and turned to the window. “Yes. Later. May I leave through _this_ portal?”

Max’s mind was racing. He _had_ to get back to class otherwise he’d miss out on the chapter 15 discussion which he sorely needed, but he also needed to make sure this girl was safe. School though this technically was, you couldn’t just let a twelve-year-old walk around a _college campus_ on her own. He could possibly slip out with her and just keep her in class with him so long as she kept quiet, which she seemed pretty good at doing, but even still people would ask questions and she might start to get bored. Oh yes, he could believe her and let her go on her own way. But she needed to be safe, and he _really_ wanted to know what was up with these gems. Why they turned into people. She could help him.

“You are debating your self-acclaimed position as my escort,” her high crystalline voice cut through his thoughts. He stared back at her.

“How…did you know…”

“Human expressions are the easiest to interpret. Easier than gems, if that is possible,” she added with a hint of dry humor.

Hmm. Well, that didn’t answer any more questions than it made. He glanced out the window. Fortunately they were on the south side of the building which meant that the only thing directly outside this bathroom was a bike path and a strip of trees. Perfect. “Okay,” he looked the girl in the eye to make sure she was listening, and told her his plan. “I want you to go outside and wait in the trees. I can give you my coat because it’s cold — ”

“For three hundred years of my existence I lived near the southern pole of my planet, where summer temperatures often reach a blazing negative two hundred degrees Celsius — nearly seventy-three degrees above absolute zero,” she put in helpfully and let him keep his coat. After a second of silence he recomposed himself and continued.

“Uh…anyway. I have an…important class that I need to be at right now so I’m going to have to let you wait for about an hour. I can give you something to read if you want — here.” He didn’t carry all his books with him all the time, but he did just so happen to have a spare molecular biology textbook in his backpack. It was probably ten pounds but she didn’t seem to have any trouble holding it. “Just…uh…wait in the woods for me and I’ll come back for you when I’m done. Try not to be seen, okay?”

The girl nodded. She glanced down at the other gems in Max’s backpack, then very simply reached forward and zipped them shut inside again. “They will not reform. Too badly injured. Your worries are nothing.”

Almost without thinking, he glanced down at the gem on her stomach. Jade. “You’re,” he scrambled to piece the sentence together so as not to sound like he was making assumptions — however, that was an impossibility no matter what his English grade. “The gem is _actually_ a part of you. A physical property that you grow from, and which you keep _on your body.”_

She tilted her head a small bit to the left. “The gem, human boy,” she replied, “Isn’t just a _part_ of me. It _is_ me.”

“Jade,” Max nodded. “That’s what it is, right? Your gem — you?”

She inclined her chin in response, with only a very little smile that told him he was right. “Max Albus,” she had cracked open his textbook, where the same two names were penciled gingerly in the top-left corner of the inside cover. “Your name?”

He smiled back.

He opened the high window and offered to let her climb on his shoulders to get out, but she simply crouched, leapt in to the air and effortlessly hurdled through the window. When Max looked down to see if she’d landed safely, she was standing at the base of the building with her back towards him. The only thing of her that was moving was her silky green hair, waving in the misty morning breeze.

“Uh, okay,” he called, trying not to be _too_ loud. “See you later, I guess!”

And Max split, again.

He came back into class breathless, one hand cupped underneath the pocket with the rocks and the other nearly strangling the backpack strap. The girl who’d noticed before gave him a strange look but for the most part ignored him as he pulled out his laptop and began taking notes again — a little jittery and definitely tense; his fingers shook every time he tried to hold them still.

So an alien girl who came from an explosion of green light, and a pocketful of rocks who could do the same thing. He wasn’t doing great as for money and suddenly thought that aliens probably needed sleep too; she’d want a place to stay in for the night and the only thing he had was a couch. Maybe Chelle could hook her up with a room or something. Maybe…maybe Chelle could take them off his hands entirely, and leave him to suffer with his money problems by himself like he’d gotten used to.

Max sat back in his seat and sighed. This was certainly a problem. Bigger than his apartment being broken into. A problem that probably involved Social Services except for the fact that they’d probably arrest him too just for the kicks, and finals were coming up real soon.

A problem that excited him. He sat forward again, and smirked at the backpack full of magical anime girl rocks.


End file.
